Every "clean up your home" book tells you to make your bed every day. And for a long time I thought that was silly. In fact, I started this post almost a year ago from the presumption that it was silly.

Notice that "a year ago" thing. That's important. Because two years is about how long this journal has lain fallow, gathering cobwebs.

It's not that a lot hasn't happened. 2013 was one of the most eventful years of my life. Some of it good, much of it bad.

I ran a bunch of 5ks. I completed 2 triathlons. We went to Hawaii. We got a dog.

Ferrett had a heart attack and triple bypass surgery. A number of family members died. Our 5-year-old goddaughter was diagnosed with brain cancer.

And I had pretty much stopped journaling. Some of these events are recorded in my almost-equally-neglected Live Journal, but most of my internet interaction had moved over to the quicker but less permanent annals of Facebook and Spark People.I felt sort of bad about not following through here, but it was too much work, and took too much concentration. I was spending way too much time on the computer, and not really getting much constructive out of it. It was casually addicting, letting the hours slip by.

I wasn't baking bread. I wasn't quilting. I wasn't reading books. I wasn't gardening or doing as much cooking as I'd wish. I was, honestly, in the face of many crises, sort of just holding on. Getting enough work done to keep getting paid, but letting a lot else that made my life a good place just slide.

Then sometime in November, I started making the bed. Every morning. If I was out of the house before Ferrett was up, when I got home I would go and make the bed. It was suddenly, after many, many years, important to me. On the morning after my stepdad died, I made the bed. On Christmas morning, when we were all in crisis because my 6-year-old niece had seized the evening before and was lying unconscious in a hospital, I made the bed. On the morning when we got the good word that she was going to recover, I made the bed.

And then other things started happening in life. I began putting together menus again so that I can actually do the cooking I want to do to keep Ferrett and me healthy. I started quilting again. My workouts got more consistent. I have the next bread in the BBA Challenge, French bread, rising in the kitchen right now.

I can't say for certain that it isn't me kind of recovering from a tough year and regaining the energy to do all these things, but I know that starting the day with that one small ritual of making the bed causes me to then pick up any laundry or detritus in the bedroom, and I come out of it with a feeling that I'm starting out on the right foot. Now excuse me, I have French bread to make.

I used to wonder why my platonic lifemate (our family, consisting of me and my husband and her and her wife was built around our apparently-odd bond) got so kirked out about the kitchen being a little bit of a wreck.

And then I decided I was going to start making cheese. And baking. And making pasta. And suddenly my days off are spent (Happily!) first cleaning the kitchen, then messing it up and then cleaning it again. And it has become a point of happiness for me. If the kitchen is clean with bread rising or pasta drying or cream culturing (or all three, as I got to do today), I am much calmer and happier.

Granted, this comes on the heels of me getting sober in a lot of ways. No intoxicating substances. No impulse buying (that one is maybe less successful than the others). Less time on the computer. No compulsive eating (backed up by the drastic step of weight-loss surgery). And all that energy I used to stuff down is being channeled into something constructive.

It's been how I dealt with the year in which my dad's six-year battle with cancer was lost and in which my husband lost his job, leaving a four-person family with two incomes when we've all got some chronic medical conditions.

And this all boils down to sometimes it's the tiny things that let us have structure in all the chaos. That one solid point of grounding and peace.

I've read about your last couple of years and have silently (for the most part) (and Geez this is a ton of parentheses) commiserated and cheered you and Ferrett on.

This sounds like healing :) My new partner, of almost 6 months, makes the bed every morning that he is here. From the first time he stayed the night. I often make my bed, because it does make me feel better to walk into the room and see some sense of order and sameness. The fact that he does it too is one of the many small things that makes "us" work so well together.

*nod* Unfuck Your Habitat also recommends that as a first step, and you would not beeeeelieeeeeeve the amount of blowback she gets about it on a regular basis. (Every time a new follower set finds her, it starts up again.) But she makes a great point: a made bed makes everything in the room seem neater, and conversely, an unmade bed can make an otherwise-impeccable room look messy. And it's like a thirty second job. Maybe two minutes if you're being really hospital-corners about it.

And it really does make a huge difference, even psychologically (for me, anyway).

(Also, "just holding on" through a year like that is an AMAZINGLY IMPRESSIVE FEAT. *hugs* May 2014 make up for 2013 a million times over.)

Part of the problem here is that Ferrett and I sleep under different bedding. He hates a top sheet and loves a duvet, and most of the time I sleep only under a top sheet with a small throw that I pull over my hips if I get chilly.

But I realized that I could just pull the coverlet over the whole thing and hid the difference, even if it is slightly lumpy. It takes a little longer, but it makes me happy.

I have even remembered to use the camera through the course of the French bread baking, so there will be pictures tomorrow!

The bed thing was kind of an issue for me. I used to make it, then one summer when I was married to John and we were painting and building a deck and doing a billion things, and having a lot of fights, his mom informed me that the only thing wrong with our marriage was that I didn't make the bed. Well, I made it faithfully for the next 5 years and we still ended up divorcing, so then I got bed rebellious.

when i was feeling really puny from chemotherapy for lymphoma(August-November 2012), i made up my mind i would do one useful thing and one ornamental thing every day. so while the dust piled up and the carpet collected cat hair, i made the bed every day and took a shower and got dressed, and did a very abbreviated daily practice (usually just the HA prayer). i left all the altars laid out and assembled, and once i had invoked all the gods, i never dismissed them. i'm not sure which was useful and which was ornamental. then later i started doing a cartoon every day to show how i was feeling. and these things got me through six months of R-CHOP and a year of recovery from it, and i think that when one is down to the bone, keeping a minimal program of daily activities acts as a connecting cord to hang on to the abilities of the past and the recovery of the future and keep them aligned at the center of one's souls.

I think that is a really good point. The other thing that had gone completely away was ANY practice. I was having a crisis of faith along with it all, but after I started making the bed and coming out of everything else, my faith began returning. And some practice is working its way back into my life.

I don't know where I learned to make the bed first,but it is what I do. If nothing else, it makes a nice clear staging/sorting area for other things (most of the bedroom clutter is usually laundry and books, so sorting them into loads or into which shelves they're going helps a lot.). My mom doesn't make hers. I can remember teenaged me helping messier friends with their rooms, and teaching them to start with the bed.Now I am my own messier friend, I have to re-claim my space.

That's why I haven't posted here, or read much. It's Just Too Much. And really is addictively distracting. And FB is so much easier: I don't have to think or type, just click "share" and my distracted brain is running out there in the streets naked.

But I really miss the slower pace here. Time for reflection. But it is much more work. Hopefully I can manage to make the bed.